Posts by Adam 41

Human-like TARDIS

<nerd> She was called Compassion. Introduced in Interference, turned into a TARDIS at the end of Shadows of Avalon, and runs off in the Ancestor Cell. The first human-like TARDIS appears in Alien Bodies, where she is from the Time Lords future, and comes complete with continent destroying weapons systems. </nerd>

Has anyone actually filled out the consultation?

I went through and answered the consultation. (i know its a futile exercise and has already been decided). I made the DRM only restricts legit users point, the possible linux/OSS problem about receiving content, the fact that the bbc should make their stuff free to air, made comments that if they must put copy protection on then all the bbc produced stuff should be unencrypted as we'd paid for it already even if films and stuff aren't, and finally made a comment that the consultation itself was biased towards acceptance as all the questions were "Do you agree ..".

"Quantum" Image Processing

Its because a quantum computer can effectively look through all possible values at once, because the bits its using to search can take all values. Basically it can search a database of size n in much less than n queries.

Having read the NIPS demo paper that Google reference I have a few points to make. First they don't actually use the quantum computer to do image recognition, they use the quantum computer to devise the rule set which is then used by normal computers to search images. Second, their main results come from the simulation of the quantum system on normal computers rather than running it on D-Wave's hardware (as that hasn't got enough functioning qubits yet). Third, there doesn't seem to be all that much computing going on in the quantum computer, as they just initialise it to a flat state and then slowly poke it until its working on a similar problem to the one they want to solve, at which point they let it decohere and read off what the result is.

How good is the PDF handling

I've been looking at ebook readers for some time now, as I'm doing a PhD and need to read a lot of papers. One of my friends tried the Sony Reader but it garbled all the mathematics whenever you zoomed in enough to read them. Its a pity really as I'm currently plowing my way through trees in having to print them off to read.

Does anyone know the performance of these things on LaTeX-generated pdf files?